Unfinished Business Read online

  “Have you taken him to a doctor to be checked out?” she asked.

  Edie shrugged her shoulders. “What good would that do?” she replied helplessly. “I’ve googled Alzheimer’s and dementia. There’s nothing to be done. There aren’t going to be any miracle cures or any happy endings. It’s just the way things are.”

  Alonzo appeared in the doorway right then. “Excuse me,” he said, “but dinner’s ready.”

  “I’m not hungry,” Edie stated at once.

  “With everything that was going on with Dad, did you happen to eat any lunch today?” Ali asked.

  “Well, no,” Edie allowed, “I guess I didn’t, but I don’t want to be any trouble.”

  “It’s no trouble, and dinner’s nothing fancy,” Alonzo told her with a smile. “It’s just leftover tamale casserole and a green salad.”

  “Considering what you’ve been through today,” Ali told her mother, “Alonzo’s tamale casserole will be just what the doctor ordered. Now, scoot, Bella,” Ali added. “Off with you. We’re going to go eat.”

  Getting the message, the dog abandoned her perch, and Ali helped her mother to her feet. To say that night’s dinnertime conversation between mother and daughter was strained would be a gross understatement. Luckily, halfway through the meal a text came in from Chris and with it a photo of Colleen and Colin sitting side by side with baby Logan tucked between them. The picture offered a welcome change of subject and focus.

  They had almost finished eating when Edie’s phone rang. “It’s your father,” she told Ali, glancing at the screen before answering. “Hello, Bobby,” she said, switching the phone to speaker. “How are things?”

  “Where are you, and when are you coming home?” Bob Larson wanted to know. He didn’t sound angry or out of sorts. He sounded somewhat anxious, but other than that his voice seemed normal.

  “I stopped by to see Ali,” Edie replied. “Chris just sent her a photo of Logan and the twins.”

  “How’s Athena doing?” Bob asked. “Having a cesarean isn’t to be sneezed at, but I hope you’ll be home soon. I’ve been waiting for you to show up before heading for the dining room. If you don’t hurry, we’ll miss out.”

  “Don’t worry,” Edie assured him at once. “I’ll be there in a few minutes. I’m leaving right now.”

  While Edie hurried off to the guest room to collect her goods, a mystified Ali remained seated at the table. Her father remembered exactly who Athena was and that she’d recently given birth by way of a C-section, but had he forgotten that he’d told his wife he wanted a divorce and ordered her out of the house? How could he be completely lucid and rational one minute and completely off the charts the next? How was that even possible?

  When Edie returned, she was ready to head out.

  “Are you sure you should go home after what happened earlier?” Ali asked.

  “I don’t have a choice,” her mother responded simply. “All those years ago, when I promised ‘in sickness and in health,’ I truly meant it.”

  A moment later she was gone.

  |CHAPTER 5|

  RENTON, WASHINGTON

  Mateo added another blanket to the top of his covers and then turned the fan on full blast before crawling back into bed. Not that he needed the fan to cool things off. It was April after all, and temperatures in and around Seattle barely limped into the fifties on a daily basis. No, he used the fan as white noise to block out the constant squabbling and the roaring television volume. His latest housemates were a pair of argumentative drunks, and their never-ending wrangling went on for hours. Staying up all night didn’t bother either of them because they weren’t working. Of the three, Mateo was the only one with a job, which meant he had to be up and out early.

  Still, drunk or not, slovenly or not, these guys were a big improvement on the last pair, both of whom had been convicted felons. Since Mateo was on parole and wasn’t supposed to associate with felons, he’d been terrified that word would somehow get back to his parole officer. Fortunately for him, both of the undesirables had reneged on paying their rent, and Randy had sent them packing. The drunks were drunks and very annoying, but at least they didn’t constitute the kind of parole violation that could have sent Mateo back inside.

  Now, with the fan muting the racket, he lay with his hands behind his head, stared up at the dimly lit ceiling, and considered the state of his life. He’d been out of prison for eleven months at this point, but he had made very little progress in rebuilding his life. Yes, he still had his loading-dock job at the thrift store next door. St. Vincent’s didn’t necessarily pay much, but you couldn’t beat the commute. And the job came with some surprising side benefits.

  Because Mateo was on the loading dock and in charge of the drop-off location for donations, he was also in charge of the first sort. This meant that he saw stuff coming in before it ever made it inside, to say nothing of onto the sales floor. When items came in that he wanted, he was able to put them aside and then wheel and deal when it came to setting the price. In fact, that was how he had scored the fan last summer before it got really hot outside. He’d bought it for five bucks. By positioning it in his open window, it had kept him cool as a cucumber all through the latter part of July and the middle of August, when a ninety-degree heat wave had settled over the city and stayed on for the better part of a month.

  He continued to be astonished by the stuff people just threw away. Someone had tossed an old MacBook Air into their rubbish heap. Mateo had found the computer but no power cord. He bought the computer for ten bucks and then paid another twenty-five online for a used power cord. When he finally was able to boot up the computer, he discovered that the previous owners hadn’t bothered to wipe it before throwing it away. Mateo had no interest in whoever had tossed the computer, so he had returned it to its factory setting and started over, including installing any number of updates before he could make the damned thing work. Not doing required updates was probably the reason the original owner had chucked it in the first place, but eventually Mateo was able to get it going.

  By then, having lived in the place and paid his rent on time for five months in a row, Mateo had become one of Randy Wasson’s longest and most dependable tenants. As a bonus Randy had given Mateo the Wi-Fi code that allowed him to sign on from home, but only on the condition that he not share the password with anyone else. Considering the caliber of his fellow roomers, that promise was easy to keep.

  The fact that Mateo had saved so much of his meager wages while he was in prison made a huge difference in his quality of life once he was out. Even before his first thrift-store paycheck, he was able to buy groceries and a bus pass and could treat himself to the occasional Burger King or TacoTime lunch. When that first paycheck finally did show up, he didn’t dare leave any money lying around in his room. Instead he went to a bank, and after keeping back enough to live on, he created an actual savings account and got himself a prepaid, refillable Visa card he could use in place of cash. One of the first things he did with the Visa and then every month thereafter was log on to the prison’s commissary system and make a fifty-dollar deposit into Pop’s account. His friendship with his former cellmate had seen Mateo through some very tough times, and sending Pop a little something each month was Mateo’s way of repaying that debt. But he didn’t bother with sending along any messages. He knew something about Pop Johnson that no one else inside the Monroe Correctional Facility knew—he had no living relatives on the outside, or friends either for that matter. Sending the money itself was message enough. Nothing more needed to be said.

  Prior to getting his cast-off computer up and running, Mateo had made good use of the computers at the Renton Public Library. When he asked Randy where the nearest library was located, his landlord had looked at Mateo as though he were off his rocker.

  “The library?” he asked in dismay. “You want to go to the library? What the hell for?”

  “To use the computers,” Mateo had told him.

  “I thought libra
ries had books,” Randy said. “I didn’t know they had computers.” But in the end, he’d located the address. “It’s quite a ways from here,” Randy said, presenting Mateo with a printout of a MapQuest map.

  In actual fact it wasn’t all that far—a little over a mile. “Thanks, man,” Mateo had told Randy. “I’ve got this. I can walk.”

  And so he did. He loved being able to walk somewhere with a purpose—like going to work or the library. It beat walking empty-headed laps around a prison rec yard just to get a meager bit of outdoor exercise.

  The first time Mateo arrived at the Renton Public Library on Mill Avenue, he was enchanted. The building had been constructed over the Cedar River, and seeing it for the first time took his breath away. He stepped inside and located an unused computer. Once he settled down in front of it and, for the first time, logged in to the e-mail account Mrs. Ancell had helped him create, he felt as though he was finally free, and although Renton was a long way from Yakima, he also felt a sense of homecoming.

  IT work was what Mateo had studied in college, and he was determined to somehow work his way back into that field. It was why he’d continued to study on his own the whole time he was incarcerated, and many of the advanced materials Mrs. Ancell had obtained for him over the years had come to him through the magic of interlibrary loans. Warden Pierce probably would have had a fit if he’d known that the prison librarian had allowed Mateo to search out the books he wanted by using her desktop computer. Once he located the titles he needed, she’d been the one who actually ordered them, but he was familiar with the process.

  The first time he tried to do an interlibrary loan on his own, however, he ran into a major stumbling block. In order to request a title, he had to supply his library-card number, and of course he didn’t have one of those. He went up to the desk and filled out the form, including his name and address. When he handed it over to the clerk, however, she told him, “I’ll need to have proof of residence.”

  “How do I do that?” he asked.

  “A current driver’s license, voter ID, or even your name on a utility bill would work,” he was told. Unfortunately, Mateo could produce none of those. Randy wasn’t especially keen on paying taxes to the IRS on any of the money he earned renting out rooms, so his tenants paid their rent in cash—with no receipts and zero paperwork. Nobody’s name was on a lease, much less on a utility bill. Voter ID? As a convicted felon, you could forget about that. And although Mateo still carried around that long-expired driver’s license, that wouldn’t have worked either.

  So he didn’t manage to request any interlibrary loans that night, but he didn’t walk out of the library empty-handed either. In addition to helping Mateo find technical materials for himself, Mrs. Ancell had introduced him to the world of science fiction. In the lobby of the library, he found shelves lined with books being sold by friends of the library. Among them was a fat volume of Isaac Asimov’s short stories. That night, when his fellow renters turned on the TV set and started bickering over what to watch, Mateo had something else to do.

  But that fruitless trip to the library had launched him off on something else—a quest to get his driver’s license—although not because he wanted to drive. Without either a car or insurance, that was out of the question. He wanted a driver’s license so he could obtain a library card.

  The next week he took a bus to the nearest Department of Licensing, grabbed a number, and waited in place for the better part of an hour before being called to the counter. The fact that he was able to pull out his long-expired license and hand it over to the surly clerk carried no weight whatsoever. He was told he needed to start the process over from scratch, including showing up with a birth certificate and then taking both the written and driving exams. In addition, for the driving exam, he was told he would need to provide his own vehicle.

  Presented with two monumental obstacles, Mateo decided to tackle what he considered to be the easier one first. By then he had managed to buy a cheap phone, as opposed to a smart one, a phone that, like his Visa card, didn’t come with a pricey contract and could be refilled with minutes as required. Armed with that and the scrap of paper from his wallet that listed family phone numbers, he dialed the one for his mother, but she didn’t answer. “The number you have dialed is no longer in service. Please check the number and dial again,” a computerized female voice told him.

  When calling on the phone didn’t work, Mateo sat down and wrote his mom a long letter, thanking her for her help, telling her where he was living and that he had found work. At the very end of the letter, he asked if she could please send him a copy of his birth certificate. A week and a half after he’d mailed the letter, it came back to him, unopened, with the words “RETURN TO SENDER” scrawled in ink across his mother’s name on the envelope. He didn’t know who had returned his letter, but the handwriting definitely wasn’t Olivia Vega’s.

  Unwilling to give up, Mateo returned to that very old list of phone numbers. Two of the numbers were answered by people who clearly weren’t family members. With the only remaining number belonging to Eddie, his oldest brother—the one who’d given him orders not to come to their father’s funeral—Mateo took a deep breath to steel himself before dialing the number.

  “Hola.”

  Mateo knew at once it was Eddie. That was how he always answered the phone.

  “Hey, Eduardo,” he said, not bothering with any niceties. “Mateo here. I’ve lost Mom’s phone number. Can you tell me how to get in touch with her?”

  “Why don’t you go straight to hell?” Eddie replied. “Don’t you think Mom has enough on her plate right now without having to deal with you?” Then he hung up. Mateo was left holding a dead phone to his ear and wearing a hole in his heart. The parole board might have decided he’d paid his debt to society, but obviously his family disagreed.

  Some people would’ve just given up then, but not Mateo. He went through the cumbersome process of obtaining a copy of his birth certificate through official channels in Yakima. That took close to two weeks, and a week after that, with the help of Randy’s borrowed pickup truck, Mateo had his newly minted driver’s license in hand.

  And all the way along, he spent his online time at the library searching down and perusing every tech magazine he could lay hands on. Technical advances were proceeding at such exponential rates that by the time a book was published, the material was often already obsolete, so the techniques mentioned in the magazines were far more current than what was available in books.

  When Mateo wasn’t pursuing the most up-to-date technical information, he devoted a good deal of time to searching out everything he could locate on the death of Emily Tarrant. The first item he found was an obituary in the Seattle Times online edition concerning the death of Emily’s mother, Abigail Marie Tarrant, who had passed away from natural causes in January. No wonder she hadn’t attended his final parole hearing. The article mentioned that she’d been preceded in death by her husband, Matthew, and her beloved daughter, Emily Anne. In lieu of flowers, donations were suggested to the Emily Tarrant Memorial Scholarship fund at the University of Washington.

  So Emily was still being remembered and memorialized, while the guy who’d presumably murdered her had been ground to dust under the heel of the so-called justice system. Mateo was able to find plenty of coverage about both the murder and his subsequent conviction. There wasn’t a peep anywhere about his being released from prison sixteen years later, and as far as Mateo was concerned, that was just as well.

  The other thing he didn’t find in the articles was any hint at all about who might have been the real killer. It seemed likely that eventually he would have to find help in that regard, probably by hiring a private detective, but doing that cost money—more money than he could earn at St. Vincent de Paul’s. That meant he needed a better job. So he gave up the Emily Tarrant searches in favor of focusing on job searches and sending out résumés, both of which he’d been doing for months now to no avail.

 
; When the paperwork called for personal references, he always used Maribeth Ancell and his boss at St. Vincent’s, Raymond Dougherty. Those obviously weren’t doing the job, however, since he had sent out dozens of résumés without getting so much as a single callback. He was never invited in for an interview, even for the lowly coder jobs for which he was overqualified.

  Lulled by white noise from the fan, Mateo fell asleep. When he awakened the next morning, he turned off the fan and discovered that the house was blissfully quiet. He used the electric pot in his room to heat water for instant coffee and then settled down in front of his computer to do some online research. These days the workstation in his bedroom consisted of a small wooden desk and a rolling chair he’d scored from a pile of abandoned office furniture left on the loading dock. The whole thing had cost him forty bucks—twenty for the chair and twenty for the desk.

  That morning, while scanning through an article on trendsetters in the world of computer science, Mateo was stunned to spot a familiar name—B. Simpson. The article stated that Mr. Simpson and his Arizona-based company, High Noon Enterprises, had won international renown for being on the cutting edge in cybersecurity.

  Mateo sat frozen, staring at the name on the screen for the better part of a minute. Mr. Simpson had been the co-owner of Video Games International, the company Mateo had gone to work for shortly after graduating from college. Mateo had met the man once, but that was it. His immediate supervisor at VGI was a guy named Stuart Ramey. Stuart had been nice enough in a weird sort of way.

  Once the cops had placed Mateo under arrest, he had used a jail telephone to let Stuart know that due to a “pressing personal matter” he would be unable to return to work. Calling being arrested for murder a “pressing personal matter” was a lot like putting lipstick on a pig, and considering the amount of coverage the case had received in local media outlets, Stuart probably knew the truth about his situation anyway. After his parole, on the off chance that they might consider taking him back, Mateo had looked for Video Games International, but it had vanished completely, most likely gobbled up by a larger corporate entity of some kind.